Benchmarking your accounting firm against the wider industry
Ian Vacin
Co-Founder & Chief Partnerships Officer, Karbon
How does your accounting firm compare to others? Are the results you are achieving through long hours, sleepless nights and dedication to clients greater than what is being achieved by your peers? Or are other firms doing better from a revenue, growth, or work-life balance point of view, simply by working smarter?
These are questions that you have probably wondered as you’ve put in late nights at the office or struggled to meet another deadline. But how can you really know the answer?
Publicly available survey results on the topic use questions and data often irrelevant to your firm, or provide narrow insights on things like billing, cloud adoption or utilization rates. You need a way to take into account all the inputs of your firm and turn that into a singular metric that can be compared to others.
We have learned that the biggest issues facing firm owners around the world have nothing to do with technical knowledge. Instead, there exists a sizeable gap in the skills required to be a successful business owner and entrepreneur. Unlike the technical side of accounting, which can be measured by CPA credits and exams, there is no way to assess the non-technical proficiency of a firm.
This is why we have launched the Karbon Practice Excellence Scorecard. For the first time, you now have a simple method to qualify and quantify the critical business ability of your firm—and compare your results to others.
From a simple 7-minute survey, the Scorecard provides your firm with measurements across the four pillars of running a successful accounting practice: strategy, management, efficiency, and growth. Based on hundreds of data points already captured, your firm will be given a 0-100 score for each pillar, indicating where you stand in comparison to the wider industry. You can learn more about how we developed the Scorecard here.
These pillars are an aggregate of the 12 areas of firm competency that influence your firm's overall proficiency. Excelling in each of these 12 areas—and the 4 overarching pillars—is how you will achieve a higher level of practice excellence.
12 areas of competency (and their 4 overarching pillars) that measure Practice excellence proficiency
Not only does Karbon’s Practice Excellence Scorecard show you the specific areas your firm excels at, what you need to work on, and how you are performing against other firms, you will receive a tailored list of recommended resources to help you grow in the areas that need most work.
This equips you with the personalized information and action plan you need to focus your efforts and ultimately achieve practice excellence.
Begin your journey to Practice Excellence today. Take the free, Karbon Practice Excellent Assessment now.